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Here are the four things every prospect process must have to successfully land your next ideal client.
A dream prospect just walked through your door – a prospect with more zeros behind their asset value than your top five clients combined. What’s your first move?
You will lose if your initial inclination is to work twice as hard and twice as fast to prove your value.
No one will be impressed. Think about how you feel on the consumer end of a business relationship. It's like when the door-to-door pest control salesman hits your neighborhood and is super pushy about making a sale.
Are you more interested in their product – or does the hard sale turn you off? You close the door and move on with your day.
Prospects feel the same way when you’re overbearing in your process. They can also tell when you don’t have a process at all.
Here’s how to land your dream clients without begging for a sale.
Set your meeting up for success
To deliver massive value during your first face-to-face prospect meeting, set your prospective client up for success.
In my practice, most prospective clients book an appointment with us after visiting our website, listening to our podcast, and watching our YouTube videos on planning federal retirements.
Before our prospects walk through our door, they’ve already had positive exposure to our business and services. Once a prospect contacts our office to book an appointment, they receive eight to 12 valuable contacts from our firm.
These contacts are not marketing newsletters but valuable pieces of information that are unique to that person and have actionable items.
Prospects receive videos explaining what to expect during our first meeting, how to upload all necessary documents, and why filling out our fact finder is imperative for their success.
While the fact finder is a lot of work for prospects to fill out, every one of our prospects has been grateful for the opportunity to compile information they hadn’t considered before.
Hire me or not, the fact finder provides value because the prospect will walk away from my office with all their financial information in one easy-to-reference place.
Answer the prospect’s personal questions
Prospects are coming to you for a reason, and you’re doing them a disservice by glancing past the questions and concerns they have about their financial situation.
Before prospects enter our conference room, we provide many opportunities for them to share their questions and concerns:
- An entire section of our fact finder is dedicated to any pressing questions and special considerations.
- A week before the prospect’s appointment, we email them asking for any questions they may have.
- Two days before their appointment, our relationship manager personally contacts them to solicit any further questions.
All of the prospect's submitted questions are printed, and I carry them into the meeting with the prospect’s case packet. Within the first five minutes of our meeting, I’ll pull out the questions/concerns page and immediately transition to their pressing problems:
Mr. and Mrs. Prospect, thank you for spending all the time submitting your questions in advance. I know it's a lot of work. I have those printed out and in front of me. I want to ensure we’re answering and talking about every single one. But before I move on, what other big questions or concerns do you have today that you want to make sure we get addressed?
During this entire conversation, I’m curious and empathetic towards them. I genuinely want to know what brought the prospect in and how I can make this time the most valuable for them. It’s literally my life’s mission to deliver as much value as possible in this meeting, and I want them to feel how excited I am to work with them.
Hire me or not, I deliver as much value as possible
Regardless of whether the prospect is an ideal client, if they get on my calendar, I will bring in my value sledgehammer and deliver as much value as possible during that hour.
Even if the client isn’t an ideal fit for my firm, I will still outline what they should be doing. I’m not going to hold anything back.
I want every prospect who comes my way to be glad they spent an hour working with Micah Shilanski.
Keep the focus on them, not on you
If your prospect process is failing, it's likely because you’re too focused on meeting your own needs and not the prospects’.
For the first 45 to 50 minutes, I focus entirely on answering their questions, addressing their concerns, and giving the best advice possible.
Often, prospects will begin by asking how they can work with us, and a trap advisors fall into is that they stop focusing on the prospect right then and start thinking about “me,” “myself,” and “I.”
Before the advisor realizes it, they spend the entire hour selling their services and not addressing the prospect’s financial situation.
When a prospect asks how to become a client, I gently remind them that I’m focusing on meeting their needs first:
That’s a great question, but we’ll talk about it at the end of our meeting. This hour is focused on you, and I want to ensure I’m answering all your important questions.
I won’t answer any questions about becoming clients until after I’ve provided tremendous value to them and their situation.
While this may sound minor, this approach has dramatically impacted our success.
Focusing on the client’s needs instead of my own has made all the difference in the world.
Action Items
Pull your prospect process out of your head and put it on paper. Spell out the literal process step by step.
When someone contacts your office, what happens next? What steps are they going to go through?
After you’ve written everything down, stick to it no matter what. Identify any steps you are susceptible to breaking and implement a forcing mechanism to ensure you stick to it.
Micah Shilanski, CFP®, is a financial planner who achieves the impossible. Micah is recognized as a leader in the concept of lifestyle design for financial planners and has spoken at conferences across the country. Micah is an advisor with Shilanski and Associates, a founder of Plan Your Federal Retirement, and a co-founder of The Perfect RIA.
Read more articles by Micah Shilanski